The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Well, I was thinking on this a bit and while I really like Elden Rings map, I don't necessarily think that it's particularly groundbreaking. And I think I realized why. ER's map setup, where you generally just find your own way and direct your own exploration feels really similar to Morrowind with a bunch of QoL improvements. The reason I personally like ER's open world approach is because it feels like a refreshing throwback to the olden days of open world maps where the concept of how to direct a player on a big map had not yet really been established. I don't hate modern Ubisoft style open world map systems, but I can't deny that I find the preponderance of quest markers, vendor markers, item markers, landmark markers, and marker markers to be a little fatiguing. There's a lot of shit on Horizon's map for instance and looking at it and thinking of all the shit to be done makes me pre-emptively tired instead of excited.
So, how come people are calling Elden Ring's open world ground breaking? I honestly think its because of the age of people talking. Morrowind was released in 2002. Two years before current twenty year old's were born. Realistically you would need to be in your late twenties to have played it at all, early thirties to really remember it. A lot of the current game playing demographic won't have experienced old style open worlds, so they probably won't realize this is more like a throwback than a leap forward.
Kids these days find everything groundbreaking just because they haven't seen it before or haven't seen something for a while.
It's not so much groundbreaking than it is a return to form? I think you're right, it's not much different from games like Morrowind. Heck, I would argue it's still similar to the recent Bethesda titles as well. All the newer Bethsoft games added in this respect is just a functional quest log and quest markers and it never quite went down the path of having to play stupid minigames. Granted it did add collectibles like the pip boys.
Here's a map, it's full of stuff, go figure it out. And the stuff you figure out are largely related to the game and isn't full of arbitrary content unrelated to the game.
Which is what I find is the sin of the Ubisoft type open world. You start a mission and you either get transported somewhere linear, or have a lot of arbitrary restrictions. There's collectibles. There's side activities like racing and other weird things that don't even utilize the core gameplay.
I think people just rather.... play in the open world and have the open world be the actual game. Rather than glorified distractions and travel time in between the real content.
Sometimes less is more as well. It's more exciting to kinda stumble into a boss or dungeon, and find something you didn't expect. Rather than have the game straight up tell you HEY THIS UPGRADE IS HERE!! Or you unlock the upgrade by collecting 20 limited edition soda cans.
I do think Elden Ring does have some rather obtuse design choices, though this has been a problem with other Souls games as well. The sidequests are incredibly arbitrary and obtuse sometimes. Like because I didn't talk to someone before defeating a boss, that sidequest has failed? Or someone dies? Or maybe you're not meant to talk to someone before killing the boss? I really hate this nonsense, and it doesn't help that certain items can be locked behind them.
I feel like there could be more information provided in some respects. If the Ubisoft sandbox just tells you too much, then the Elden Ring sandbox tells you too little.
Yeah I’m pretty much doing the same, primarily building up DEX and INT, with some of everything else here and there. Considered doing Faith instead but spells seem too good to ignore now, and I’d probably never get the George Michael song or Dutch out of my head. I’ll bump it enough to use the poison mist. Speaking of it’s kinda odd something like that would be assigned to Faith now after being under Pyromancy…or is it? Every religion seems to have a dark side. I was going to say well, maybe not Buddhism but umm…
If I had to guess it would be a lot of these people (who initially were reviewers) have had to spend a lot of time in a lot of other open worlds that are pretty shitty. Most of the compliments to ER’s design aren’t about it doing anything revolutionary, but simply respecting the player’s time with QoL stuff and making exploration actually feel as it should instead of turning it into a chore full of checklists or bogging the player down with story exposition. Things like crafting, fast travel, traversal, setting markers, etc. is done in a way that encourages exploration and a sense of discovery while being streamlined enough to never feel like busy work or inconvenient. I only have a PS4 and it’s still pretty quick to hop around to different grace sites for example.
It isn’t perfect as there is still a lot of blatant obtuseness in terms of progression, and there are some redundant aspects like caves and some enemies/bosses that kinda feel like procedural content ala Chalice Dungeons, but it’s still quite a solid first effort that must’ve been refreshing enough next to nearly everything else out in the open *world* recently.
As an aside, the comments above about it being more of a return to the old style ring true, but also back then I don’t think there was as much of the social media/youtube/instant gratification scene that’s permeated gaming culture. Like most of these people must’ve had review copies, because after the game’s been out for a day there are already dozens of videos telling you how to farm unlimited runes or get over leveled quick and easy. In a way it’s nice to have those resources but I have to wonder if it kinda spoils how the developers intended most people to play. The book I’m reading about Dark Souls, “You Died” goes into detail about the collaborative effect of sharing secrets and tactics that Demon’s Souls had on the earliest players, and I think that intention still holds true when making these games. It’s just a shame we too often either don’t have the time, patience or attention span to play them that way.
Last edited:
I just see these as the solution to the whole 'accessibility' issue. I definitely don't have the time and energy to git gud, but I kinda want to roam around spanking shit and playing the way I want.
The game still beats my ass even after I've exploited some quick rune farming though. Clearly I need to exploit it harder and get 100 vigor.
Last edited:
Another example of just how crystallized this discussion has become is that I didn't say *any* of those things. It's just the rote response at this point.
Talking about mainstream games is exhausting
EDIT: Anyway, gonna give this a shot tonight. Being on call has it's perks
Most of the people praising it I think would've probably played Morrowind though. At least, they're part of the youtube gaming crowd that would've likely touched on the classics. I myself have never played Morrowind and I'm not really flabberghasted by Elden Ring all the same.
I think what Elden Ring does do better than most open-worlds is keep the player's focus on the world itself rather than on icons. While I will say something like Horizon: Forbidden West has just a bit too much bloat, a more present issue is that your attention is diverted to the map and HUD making the actual gameworld often feel secondary. Ghost of Tsushima tried to alleviate this by making the wind guide you instead of an arrow or marker, but this resulted in kinda the same issue of you just looking at the wind the whole time. Elden Ring doesn't have anything like that apart from a very unintrusive compass, and it really helps the world to take complete centre stage. But the flipside to that is that there's really nothing much concrete to discover in this world other than more enemies.
Horizon: Forbidden West did piss me off with a bunch of bullshit (nothing that really had much to do with its open-world but still), yet I did play it for the better part of three weeks. It's also had some sequences that were really quite memorable. Elden Ring I picked up less than a week ago and I can already feel the monotony set in, since there's just very little to do in this world both mechanically and narratively.
While I think Elden Ring has more artistic merrit than most open-world games, including Horizon: Forbidden West, this does not feel like the next step for open-world games. Both Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 feel like better examples of that, but than I'm sure this just comes down to personal taste.
Though FROM(or ever any dev) has to know that any secrets in the game aren't going to stay secret any longer once someone with an internet connection discovers them and people are going to use the net to help each other. On the subreddit, there's a lot of discussion on the subreddit about if Summons(spirit ashes) are broken/etc and whether using them is how the devs intended you to play....which again, the internet exists, FROM knows it exists, and knows any OP builds and weapons and summons are gonna become known pretty much instantly to the wider public and it would be stupid to assume they don't know people are gonna be exploiting stuff like the mimic tear.
I get with Demons souls, yeah, you discover yourself because the game didn't really much of a community but we're long past the point there these games are obscure and information in readily available. I almost wonder if FROM doesn't count on this and that's why certain things are placed the way they are(There just happens to be a bleed weapon just outside the starting region and bleed is incredibly powerful in his game) and then that there's an easily accessed portal that takes you to Hell where you can go beat up on a defenseless dragon in the leg with the morning star where her kids can't find or hurt you until she and her kids die which lets you like 10,000 runes + 5 dragon hearts in the early game. And there's a bonfire like 20 seconds from it on foot). There's no way FROM didn't know that was going to be an early game exploit for people who want to gain like 10-15 free levels at the start..
On one hand, Poor Dragon. OTOH, FREE LEVELS! You may die but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Though ironically some stuff is still obscure even now. I didn't know Dark Souls 2 has a way to resurrect(as phantoms) NPCs you killed as a gravestone so you can still buy stuff from them(because if you killed Gavlan for some bizarre reason you can still buy poison). I had never heard that was even a thing until like a month ago
Last edited:
In all my playtime I've ignored pretty much all the bosses (only having fought two Tibia Mariners), and just this afternoon I went back to the starting area of the game and had a bunch of 'm for breakfast.
Also, hammer Kratos is in this game apparently.
Also, hammer Kratos is in this game apparently.
To clarify, mostly regarding QoL stuff in terms of open world design. On one hand yeah, progression and quest lines are still obtuse as shit, dying repeatedly to bosses, etc. But that’s expected with FROM games. There is minimal bs in the way of this though because the world design is pretty well optimized for exploration>combat encounters>character building. Very little gets in the way of this loop, although the player is free to augment it as they see fit.
Eh, it's alright.It sure is fun stomping bosses into paste aint it
The most fun so far is fighting the big, giant slob guys on horseback.
Alright after beating the game I think i can safely provide my final thoughts / review here: (Buckle Up this is gonna be a 2 Parter)
PART 1: Gameplay
Anyone remember WoW? Specifically the good old days of WoW back in Wraith of the Lich King and sooner? Raiding was cool back then, bosses were hard but on paper they weren't overly complex or crazy. Fast forward to Wow's most recent raid in 9.2 and the mechanics of the bosses have gotten to insane levels of complicated.
That's what Elden Ring reminds me of. Except it's almost every enemy in the game. Miyazaki seemingly has taken it upon himself to make the enemies and bosses in this game as hard as he possibly could. Which would be fine in theory. People have been playing Souls games for 10 years now and as the player-base increases in skill enemies need more tricks up their sleeves to keep up the challenge. Unfortunately Miyazaki's answer to this problem was to give every enemy unrelenting attacks and design them capable of destroying the player's most common defense in a Souls game. The roll.
The enemies are designed to roll punish more often than not. Much like Sekiro, Elden Ring's entire design seems to be trying to break the player away from the Soul's mnidset, while at the same time still very obviously being a souls game. A lot of it feels like Miyazaki is torn, as if he clearly wants to make different games but is trapped so deep by the pit of success that Dark Souls is that he doesn't think he can straight up make a normal video game without it also being more Dark Souls. And as punishment to us, he made every enemy specifically to fuck with Souls players.
The reason why I say that is because playing Elden Ring like a Souls game will get you destroied 9/10 times. You could of course beat your dick against it until you finally kill whatever you're trying to kill, but I don't think that's what Miyazaki wants you to do.
My first attempt, I played the game like I've done every other Souls game. Shit loads of Strength and HP, plus the biggest cocksmashing weapon i can find. Worked for 5 out 6 of the previous games. Should work for this one. Alas I found the game unreasonably hard, and to some degree I still do which I will go over in a minute.
I did a little research (and watched some pro Souls players) and what was suggested to me was to go find a specific katana and play as an INt/DEX Samurai. The reason being is that Arts are the way to play the game, specifically Arts that add diversity to your build. You see being a completely melee player is going to be rough. at the same time being totally ranged is also a problem. What you need is both.....thus this Katana the Moonveil. The moonveil is like any katana in the game, if you hit an enemy enough it does bleed damage which once built up from hitting the enemy enough will do a burst % of that enemy's heatlh and it's usually a lot like 20% a lot. But the Moonveil adds one extra thing in your arsenal....the art....shoots FUCKING LAZERS!!! That's right fuckers, think you can out distance me? SUPRISE! Lazer!
Seriously this sword is but one example of the sheer power that arts specifically bring to the table. With Moonveil's art, I am staggering end-game bosses in two hits for a visceral attack. There is one end-game boss that the Moonveil ripped apart without the boss being able to do a single damn thing.
And this new mindset is I think what Miyazaki is going for. Pulling people out of the Souls combat (though if you really want to do it you still can) and focusing on building your character around abilities. By the time I reached end-game I had trinkets that lowered the FP cost of my Arts AND gave me FP back whenever I critically hit an enemy. Meaning that with two hit staggering monsters I recovered my FP by getting the visceral and never had to worry about FP. Of course this means the game boiled down to spamming the weapon art so it's not a perfect system and it still showcases my biggest gripe with this game.
The Boss fights almost entirely in Elden Ring are terrible. Things look really cool, but the mechanics of almost evrey fight are aweful. And even when bosses are mostly fine, the room you fight them in is awful. For example the Falling Star Beast is not that hard of a fight, but the first time you encounter it you fight it in a very tight room where every attack it has covers 95% of the room and it runs around wildly making it's shit near impossible to avoid. I beat by sheer outleveling. However the other Falling Star fight happens outside and in the wide open space it's just like fights a big bull with a tail, not a big deal. There are several copy pasted bosses that occur in tiny bullshit rooms that make the fights insane for no reason other than no space to avoid (which isn't fair), or the camera can't keep up because it doesn't have space to follow the action (which also isn't fair).
Taking out the room part of the fights and the sheer volume of copy pasted reuses. You have the other issue of the relentless nature of the bosses. Most of the late game bosses are designed with damn near zero down time to punish, screen wide attacks, and flurries that cannot be dodged because of lingered AoE effects. To me it feels like the kitchen sink approach to boss design. "Hey Miyazaki what attacks should we give this boss?". "Yes."
The final boss literally jumps 17 miles away from you and spams you with ridiculous spells while you try to get close and if you don't get close fast enough, it jumps another 17 miles away again. Meaning you have to manage your stamina to not only run, but also dodge the bullet hell magic barrage, but ALSO have enough stamina left by the time you get to the boss to fucking hit it. Also this boss is a two parter which means you have to fight a very difficult boss BEFORE this final fight everytime you die.
And don't get me started on Starcaller Radahn, that fight can absolutely go fuck itself.
So here's the core of the problem for me. The bosses have become overly crazy in that they are just not fun to fight. They no longer feel like duels between powerful foes like Darks Souls 1,3 or Bloodborne. They feel like spammy bullshit where one mistake is unrecoverable from. Thankfully the silver lining is there are several Arts in the game that many of these bosses cannot deal with and if you have a weapon with one of these Arts, you can win the game without much effort. The speedrun is 28 minutes and falling.
PART 1: Gameplay
Anyone remember WoW? Specifically the good old days of WoW back in Wraith of the Lich King and sooner? Raiding was cool back then, bosses were hard but on paper they weren't overly complex or crazy. Fast forward to Wow's most recent raid in 9.2 and the mechanics of the bosses have gotten to insane levels of complicated.
That's what Elden Ring reminds me of. Except it's almost every enemy in the game. Miyazaki seemingly has taken it upon himself to make the enemies and bosses in this game as hard as he possibly could. Which would be fine in theory. People have been playing Souls games for 10 years now and as the player-base increases in skill enemies need more tricks up their sleeves to keep up the challenge. Unfortunately Miyazaki's answer to this problem was to give every enemy unrelenting attacks and design them capable of destroying the player's most common defense in a Souls game. The roll.
The enemies are designed to roll punish more often than not. Much like Sekiro, Elden Ring's entire design seems to be trying to break the player away from the Soul's mnidset, while at the same time still very obviously being a souls game. A lot of it feels like Miyazaki is torn, as if he clearly wants to make different games but is trapped so deep by the pit of success that Dark Souls is that he doesn't think he can straight up make a normal video game without it also being more Dark Souls. And as punishment to us, he made every enemy specifically to fuck with Souls players.
The reason why I say that is because playing Elden Ring like a Souls game will get you destroied 9/10 times. You could of course beat your dick against it until you finally kill whatever you're trying to kill, but I don't think that's what Miyazaki wants you to do.
My first attempt, I played the game like I've done every other Souls game. Shit loads of Strength and HP, plus the biggest cocksmashing weapon i can find. Worked for 5 out 6 of the previous games. Should work for this one. Alas I found the game unreasonably hard, and to some degree I still do which I will go over in a minute.
I did a little research (and watched some pro Souls players) and what was suggested to me was to go find a specific katana and play as an INt/DEX Samurai. The reason being is that Arts are the way to play the game, specifically Arts that add diversity to your build. You see being a completely melee player is going to be rough. at the same time being totally ranged is also a problem. What you need is both.....thus this Katana the Moonveil. The moonveil is like any katana in the game, if you hit an enemy enough it does bleed damage which once built up from hitting the enemy enough will do a burst % of that enemy's heatlh and it's usually a lot like 20% a lot. But the Moonveil adds one extra thing in your arsenal....the art....shoots FUCKING LAZERS!!! That's right fuckers, think you can out distance me? SUPRISE! Lazer!
Seriously this sword is but one example of the sheer power that arts specifically bring to the table. With Moonveil's art, I am staggering end-game bosses in two hits for a visceral attack. There is one end-game boss that the Moonveil ripped apart without the boss being able to do a single damn thing.
And this new mindset is I think what Miyazaki is going for. Pulling people out of the Souls combat (though if you really want to do it you still can) and focusing on building your character around abilities. By the time I reached end-game I had trinkets that lowered the FP cost of my Arts AND gave me FP back whenever I critically hit an enemy. Meaning that with two hit staggering monsters I recovered my FP by getting the visceral and never had to worry about FP. Of course this means the game boiled down to spamming the weapon art so it's not a perfect system and it still showcases my biggest gripe with this game.
The Boss fights almost entirely in Elden Ring are terrible. Things look really cool, but the mechanics of almost evrey fight are aweful. And even when bosses are mostly fine, the room you fight them in is awful. For example the Falling Star Beast is not that hard of a fight, but the first time you encounter it you fight it in a very tight room where every attack it has covers 95% of the room and it runs around wildly making it's shit near impossible to avoid. I beat by sheer outleveling. However the other Falling Star fight happens outside and in the wide open space it's just like fights a big bull with a tail, not a big deal. There are several copy pasted bosses that occur in tiny bullshit rooms that make the fights insane for no reason other than no space to avoid (which isn't fair), or the camera can't keep up because it doesn't have space to follow the action (which also isn't fair).
Taking out the room part of the fights and the sheer volume of copy pasted reuses. You have the other issue of the relentless nature of the bosses. Most of the late game bosses are designed with damn near zero down time to punish, screen wide attacks, and flurries that cannot be dodged because of lingered AoE effects. To me it feels like the kitchen sink approach to boss design. "Hey Miyazaki what attacks should we give this boss?". "Yes."
The final boss literally jumps 17 miles away from you and spams you with ridiculous spells while you try to get close and if you don't get close fast enough, it jumps another 17 miles away again. Meaning you have to manage your stamina to not only run, but also dodge the bullet hell magic barrage, but ALSO have enough stamina left by the time you get to the boss to fucking hit it. Also this boss is a two parter which means you have to fight a very difficult boss BEFORE this final fight everytime you die.
And don't get me started on Starcaller Radahn, that fight can absolutely go fuck itself.
So here's the core of the problem for me. The bosses have become overly crazy in that they are just not fun to fight. They no longer feel like duels between powerful foes like Darks Souls 1,3 or Bloodborne. They feel like spammy bullshit where one mistake is unrecoverable from. Thankfully the silver lining is there are several Arts in the game that many of these bosses cannot deal with and if you have a weapon with one of these Arts, you can win the game without much effort. The speedrun is 28 minutes and falling.
PART 2: Exploration
At first glance the open world in Elden Ring is quite impressive. A vast landscape with an pretty much unlimited freedom to explore. To some the lack of map markers will be refreshing....at least at first.
There are two problems with not having map markers on the map at the begining of the game. The first being is that you have no sense of where to go because you have no reasonable expectation of where things might be. If you don't know where to start looking, it hurts the motivation to look at all. The second problem is that as you start to do things and find things on the map like ruins, caves, graces, evergaols, shacks, erdtrees, churches, towers (what's an open world without a tower), etc, almost everything you find puts an icon on the map, so over time your map starts to look like an Ubisoft map which sort of ruins the illusion.
ER's world is pretty damn large as well, and there are planety of areas that are large dungeons and cave systems that even have their own maps and don't appear on the overworld map. It's quite insane because just when you think you are getting close to the end, another huge section gets laid out before you and it keeps going. The downside to this is that very few areas are memorable. People meme on Caelid, and Limgrave the opening area, but nobody talks about Linorie of the Lakes, Altus Plateau, Volcano Manor, Siofra River, because after a few hours it's all the same shit. It also doesn't help that the map is mostly empty, not just of places of interest but also of enemies of any really note.
I know that last sentence sounds a bit counter to my first paragraph there but here me out. Yes there are a lot of locations on the map and your map will be covered in markers before you know it. However the map is a small representation of the actual world, and moving between icons is actually quite a lot of running on horseback. And the enemies that do exist in the world are more often than not, not worth fighting. You run by everything on horse back because not only are the enemies stronger than they need to be, they don't offer enough Runes to be worth bothering with.
So exploration starts being more about trying to guess where the next interesting thing might be and running there non-stop, which doesn't really yield a rewarding sense of exploration especially when I finally do find a cave or catacomb my first thought is "what kind of bullshit boss will i find here."
Luckily to the game's credits the vast majority of the weapons and armors and such are exciting to find and equip as everything feels like it has some sort of build potential. As an added bonus equipment upgrade materials are fairly plentiful outside the final few stages of upgrade, but by the time you are trying to upgrade into the final tiers, you've got your build figured out.
I wont even mention the crafting items as they are a complete waste of time and space as I crafted only once ever in over 70 hours of gameplay and that was merely to try it out. So all those flowers and fruits and mosses and shit all over the fucking place are pointless and just wastes the time of any player who tried to gather them
There are moments when the game really shines though, and it is during these caves, and cities, and castles. Everytime the game stopped being open world and started being a Souls game, it was fantastic. The open world here was just simply a waste and it could have been handled so much better. There were many ways they could have given the player freedom of travel choice while still keeping levels contained and looping ala previous souls games.
Dispite everything though I think it still is a solid game. I don't think I could rate it higher than a 8/10 though I'm probably closer to a 7. I think the hype monster has gotten to people on this game and once you take a minute to look at what you are doing, look at the way these fights go, you'll see that this all could have been handled differently.
At first glance the open world in Elden Ring is quite impressive. A vast landscape with an pretty much unlimited freedom to explore. To some the lack of map markers will be refreshing....at least at first.
There are two problems with not having map markers on the map at the begining of the game. The first being is that you have no sense of where to go because you have no reasonable expectation of where things might be. If you don't know where to start looking, it hurts the motivation to look at all. The second problem is that as you start to do things and find things on the map like ruins, caves, graces, evergaols, shacks, erdtrees, churches, towers (what's an open world without a tower), etc, almost everything you find puts an icon on the map, so over time your map starts to look like an Ubisoft map which sort of ruins the illusion.
ER's world is pretty damn large as well, and there are planety of areas that are large dungeons and cave systems that even have their own maps and don't appear on the overworld map. It's quite insane because just when you think you are getting close to the end, another huge section gets laid out before you and it keeps going. The downside to this is that very few areas are memorable. People meme on Caelid, and Limgrave the opening area, but nobody talks about Linorie of the Lakes, Altus Plateau, Volcano Manor, Siofra River, because after a few hours it's all the same shit. It also doesn't help that the map is mostly empty, not just of places of interest but also of enemies of any really note.
I know that last sentence sounds a bit counter to my first paragraph there but here me out. Yes there are a lot of locations on the map and your map will be covered in markers before you know it. However the map is a small representation of the actual world, and moving between icons is actually quite a lot of running on horseback. And the enemies that do exist in the world are more often than not, not worth fighting. You run by everything on horse back because not only are the enemies stronger than they need to be, they don't offer enough Runes to be worth bothering with.
So exploration starts being more about trying to guess where the next interesting thing might be and running there non-stop, which doesn't really yield a rewarding sense of exploration especially when I finally do find a cave or catacomb my first thought is "what kind of bullshit boss will i find here."
Luckily to the game's credits the vast majority of the weapons and armors and such are exciting to find and equip as everything feels like it has some sort of build potential. As an added bonus equipment upgrade materials are fairly plentiful outside the final few stages of upgrade, but by the time you are trying to upgrade into the final tiers, you've got your build figured out.
I wont even mention the crafting items as they are a complete waste of time and space as I crafted only once ever in over 70 hours of gameplay and that was merely to try it out. So all those flowers and fruits and mosses and shit all over the fucking place are pointless and just wastes the time of any player who tried to gather them
There are moments when the game really shines though, and it is during these caves, and cities, and castles. Everytime the game stopped being open world and started being a Souls game, it was fantastic. The open world here was just simply a waste and it could have been handled so much better. There were many ways they could have given the player freedom of travel choice while still keeping levels contained and looping ala previous souls games.
Dispite everything though I think it still is a solid game. I don't think I could rate it higher than a 8/10 though I'm probably closer to a 7. I think the hype monster has gotten to people on this game and once you take a minute to look at what you are doing, look at the way these fights go, you'll see that this all could have been handled differently.